The best of left and right equals – libertarian?

Matt Zwolinski

Republicans speak the language of fiscal conservatism and limited government. The debates over the federal budget have suggested they may be starting to take this idea seriously in one of the places it matters most: middle-class entitlements. But when it comes to military spending, frugality goes out the window.

Democrats speak the language of social justice. But here, too, there is reason for disillusionment. The Obama administration’s rush to military conflict in Libya has disappointed those who hold peace to be an essential element of justice. And this disappointment only reinforces that created by the administration’s refusal to take a strong stand against the ill treatment of military detainees and the abuses at Guantánamo.

Is there a home for those who take both the ideals of limited government and of social justice seriously? Are the two ideals compatible, or are their philosophical underpinnings irreconcilably at odds?

Commitment to limited government has a long intellectual tradition and a solid rationale in both philosophical theory and economic fact. Even when intended to help the poor, government policies like minimum-wage laws and rent control are often counterproductive – setting back the interests of the very people they are designed to help. And thinkers like Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick are right to claim that markets involve important aspects of personal liberty. Civil libertarians on the left have always recognized the importance of free speech and political assembly, but there is no good reason to think freedom becomes any less important once trade and money are involved.

The belief that society has special obligations toward the poor and vulnerable has an equally venerable tradition, and an equally convincing justification. One finds it in the doctrines of Catholic social teaching, as well as in the philosophic thought of 20th century giants like John Rawls and Amartya Sen. Even libertarian icons such as John Locke and Friedrich Hayek share much more than is commonly assumed of the left’s basic moral commitments. Their differences lie, for the most part, in their beliefs about how to realize those moral ideals in practice.

Indeed, it is within libertarianism that I believe we can find the best hope for reconciling these twin ideals. If this claim is surprising, I suspect it is because libertarianism’s primary political alliance for the last 70 to 80 years has been with the political right. Aligned first against the expansion of federal power under FDR’s New Deal, and then against the spread of international communism, libertarians generally perceived the best hope for liberty to lie in making common cause with conservatives.

But whatever the situation may have been during the Cold War, today those libertarians who take the twin ideas of social justice and limited government seriously have good reason to reconsider their alliance with the political right. Whatever reduction in the federal budget might be had by cutting spending on programs for the poor, or to National Public Radio, is trivial and symbolic. In terms of substantive and significant policy goals, libertarians today have far more in common with the political left.

For instance, libertarians share with the more consistent elements of the left an opposition to militarism and an interventionist foreign policy. To the extent that libertarians share Republicans’ alleged commitment to fiscal conservatism, it is far better expressed in limiting military conflict than in railing against welfare mothers or subsidized art.

Libertarians also share with the left an opposition to the drug war, support for greatly expanded rights of immigration and an end to corporate welfare. In each case, limiting the extent of governmental interference with individual liberty is not only compatible with a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, it is an essential prerequisite for it.

One need not choose between a bleeding heart and a level head. If helping the poor matters, then it matters that the help be given effectively. And if we have good reason to believe in the efficacy of free markets, and the limited capabilities and beneficence of government, then we have good reason to prefer local and voluntary forms of assistance over centralized and political ones. But it is misleading to talk as though the government were currently a neutral agent of the common good. In reality, when government interferes in the economy, it almost always does so to favor the middle and wealthy classes, not the poor. So for now, perhaps the most effective thing our government can do to help the poor is to stop hurting them.